Finally, A Truthful Online Encyclopedia

Is Wikipedia a little too liberal, a tad too ungodly for you? Try Conservapedia on for size.

Mocked by folks Left and Right (but mostly Left), the Wiki-based destination is marketed as an encyclopedia God would be proud of. It is devoid of inaccuracies. There’s no bias there. (Guess where we’ve gone satirical in the last few lines.) And you vandals need not enter, because there’s really no place for your lot. The project’s leader, Andrew Schlafly, a conservative (no way) writer and attorney, thinks of it as Wikipedia gone right, because we all know how big of a disaster that encyclopedia is. It has “all the neutrality of a lynch mob,” Schlafly says.

Like the White House between 2000- ____, Conservapedia doesn’t mind crossing politics with things Biblical. A mix between the two is what the Constitution’s framers obviously envisioned. And will you look at that? It’s only taken us a century or two to get things right.

For instance, the site’s entry on homosexuality starts things off with God-given messages straight from the mouth of Mr Authority denouncing same-sex relationships. The page written about kangaroos on Conservapedia is a particularly exquisite piece of research, too. Check it out for yourself if you don’t believe us.

Our question is: Does the emergence of Conservapedia mean that we finally have the Enciclopedia Ultima to share with everyone everywhere? Wait a minute. Hold up. Isn’t there already something like that? I know it starts with a ‘B’….

I’m sure there are some conservatives out there reading Profy, and some of you might already be fuming, but hey, if you’re going to talk us donkeys down and label us as weak, we get to poke and prod the “stupid nerve” of red men like yourselves. It’s only fair. And you can’t blame us for pulling off the funnies a little better than you guys. I don’t know why we’re better at the comedy. Maybe it’s God’s will.

If you’re not OK with my mixing tech and this new “social” institution of wikitastic religio-conservatism on this weblog, I can understand. We talk web apps and AJAX; we don’t wave flags. But I’m sure most of you would agree that Conservapedia is ripe for a good mock – or two, or three, or four. An indefinite amount, really.

And Schlafly isn’t all wrong with his declarations, mind you.

It’s true, vandalism is present on Wikipedia. It only takes a few minutes – perhaps a few hours at the latest – to fix a nasty edit or addition entries on the socially constructed encyclopedia, but those are much longer moments than they may appear. According to Wired’s Michael Calore, the work of hoodlums on Conservapedia took a short week to fix and/or remove. What’s a week? It’s nothing. You have Sunday, which isn’t really a day. No one does anything on Sunday. Monday really starts the week. And it’s really just a day to re-familiarize yourself with the work you left half-done on Friday. According to everyone who follows media, Tuesday is the day when everything new comes out, so it’s pretty much 24 hours of play time. Wednesday is the mid-week stint that people think of as a long break. Some recharging here, a bit of snacking there. Maybe a jaunt over to Happy Hour. Thursday is the day you tend to crunch the most, trying to get about 5 days of stuff done in about eight hours, which you never manage to accomplish. And you’re exhausted on Friday from yesterday’s overload, so you kind of just make it through. Saturday is sleep day. And then you’re back where you started.

So, really, what’s a week?